When doctors ignore pronouns, patients pay the price. Here's why
Kelly Goonan writes that asking for pronouns, gender-inclusive language, and specialized training can make a world of difference in healthcare for LGBTQ+ patients.
Pronouns belong on intake forms, right next to patient name. Mine are in my medical file, so any doctor I see with access to my data in Epic who gets it wrong is showing up unprepared.
The only ones who get a pass are EMS folks overwhelmed by the work of keeping people alive. I'm sympathetic to someone taking a wild guess at my pronouns while they're holding my guts in with their thumb.
"Birth Sex" needs to stop being a medical definition. For all of the "science" value it supposedly has, people use it very unscientifically.
Does it work for the majority of people? Sure. But even outside of the trans community, the fact is that there are plenty of intersex people born with ambiguous sex organs, or sex organs that don't match their chromosomal makeup. Or they may even have chromosomal makeups outside of the standard XX/XY binary. Male/Female birth sex labels don't apply neatly to intersex people, and on top of that it causes worse medical outcomes for trans patients.
I've seen more people pushing doctors to start adopting the anatomical inventory model, where we throw birth sex out the window and just document what organs a person does or does not have.